A bitter cold morning. Goosepath delayed due to Candy Crush Saga.
My Kindle Fire arrived and I have been loading it up with stuff. Bought it for books, and haven't loaded a single one. Too distracted by games and apps and figuring out what all I can do with it. TED Talks and NPR and Facebook and the list goes on. I can Twitter my soap opera very efficiently now. Reading the tweets someone posts let's me know what happened in a whole show. All in about 5 minutes. That's great if I miss an episode.
I find myself concerned that a whole generation of kids are so lost in their various hand held devices. I heard one parent complain that her kid wants an IPOD, a Kindle, a TV and even a 200 "gift card," for Amazon for Christmas, and even asked if you can ask Santa for CASH. This is a child under 10 years old. The kicker is that the grandmother had already bought the kid an IPAD last year!
No doubt all the sparkly things and constant action and movies and games is a delight to kids. But is it for the best to be hooked into them with such constant stimulus? Not that I want to go back to Walton's Mountain, but certainly, something of value has already been lost. Some kids have SOOOO much. And I truly believe they need to learn the spirit of giving more than receiving at this time of year. Lost among all the distraction is the truly needy.
Also, I watched a TED talk about group work and how the teaching model is changing. Not for the better. There just isn't much alone time. Working in groups, team projects, etc. does teach things in and of itself. But introverts, especially, thrive on having alone time. Deeper thoughts. Pondering. Just letting the brain digest and take in new information and process it without constant interruption and distraction.
And while I'm at it, my pet peeve right now is people who ignore you completely when you walk into a room and just continue to text, surf, flick pages, and stare into their phones. It's as if a real person standing in front of you doesn't have to be acknowledged, but heaven forbid you miss a text.
Anyway, that's my rant this morning. I'm limiting my Kindle use. And my phone is still just a phone. And some of these kids weren't even born yet when my Windows XP was invented. They will probably never know what it is. But it still works for me.
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